A whole new strain of bad writing now frequently afflicts student work, and English professor Ben Yagoda of the University of Delaware calls it “clunk.” In “The Elements of Clunk,” an essay he wrote for the January 2, 2011 issue of
The Chronicle Review, Yagoda says such writing is often marked by a “train wreck” in punctuation and “almost always favor length over brevity, ornateness over simplicity, and literalness over figuration.”
This, Yagoda theorizes, is largely due to the unfamiliarity of many students with written English. He explains: “Standard written English is a whole other language from its spoken (and texted) counterpart, with conventions not just of punctuation but also of many shortcuts to meaning—streamlined words and phrases, ellipses (omitted word or words), idioms, figures of speech—that have developed over many years. You learn them by reading. And if you haven't read much, when you set pen to paper yourself, you take things more slowly and apply a literal-minded logic, as you would in finding your way through a dark house.”
Yagoda also laments another tendency in student writing: a boom in Britishisms, among them the weirdly popular “amongst,” “amid,” and “whilst.” “In spelling,” he says, ‘grey’ has taken over from the previously standard ‘gray.’ I haven't seen ‘labour’ yet, but the day is young. ‘Advisor’ isn’t British—in fact, dictionaries label it an Americanism—but it seems so, or at least fancier and more official than good old ‘adviser.’ The ‘-or’ spelling has become so prevalent—85 million in Google, against 26 million for ‘adviser’—that although the
Times,
The New Yorker, and the Associated Press, along with
The Chronicle, cling to ‘-er,’ it has started to look funny in their articles.”
Read Ben Yagoda’s “The Elements of Clunk” in The Chronicle of Higher Education now!RELATED READINGS:In “You’ve Been Verbed,” an article that came out in the Winter 2010 issue of
Intelligent Life Magazine, London-based writer Anthony Gardner says that “no trend has been more obtrusive in recent years than the changing of nouns into verbs.” He explains: “Mothers and fathers used to bring up children: now they parent. Critics used to review plays: now they critique them. Athletes podium, executives flipchart, and almost everybody Googles. Watch out—you’ve been verbed.”
Read Anthony Gardner’s “You’ve Been Verbed” in Intelligent Life Magazine now!In “It Can Thereby Be Shown,” an article that came out in the November 18, 2010 issue of
The Chronicle of Higher Education, Rachel Toor, assistant professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University, in Spokane, asks: “Why…do so many American academics continue to ape the Brits? To be more specific: Why do so many American professors, many of whom have never even been to England, sign off their e-mail messages with ‘Cheers’? How many of those people ever speak the word without a glass in hand? What is the meaning of this?” She wonders if this isn’t “a symptom of something else, something more pernicious in academic prose.”
Read Rachel Toors’ “It Can Thereby Be Shown” in The Chronicle of Higher Education now!
